Andrew Lockley:
I told you *not *to post this in elaboration of the link to *Nature*already provided - I expected you at most to use it to replace the link if paywalled Please take this a put it where it belongs, inside the original thread On Wednesday, September 26, 2012 6:41:54 PM UTC-4, andrewjlockley wrote: > > > Nuclear winter was and is debatable > Russell Seitz > Nature > > 475, > > 37 > > (07 July 2011) > > doi:10.1038/475037b > Published online > > 06 July 2011 > > Alan Robock's contention that there has been no real scientific debate > about the 'nuclear winter' concept is itself debatable > (Nature 473,275-276; 2011). > > This potential climate disaster, popularized in Science in 1983, rested on > the output of a one-dimensional model that was later shown to overestimate > the smoke a nuclear holocaust might engender. More refined estimates, > combined with advanced three-dimensional models (see > http://go.nature.com/kss8te), have dramatically reduced the extent and > severity of the projected cooling. > > Despite this, Carl Sagan, who co-authored the 1983 Science paper, went so > far as to posit "the extinction of Homo sapiens" (C. Sagan Foreign > Affairs 63, 75-77;1984). Some regarded this apocalyptic prediction as an > exercise in mythology. George Rathjens of the Massachusetts Institute of > Technology protested: "Nuclear winter is the worst example of the > misrepresentation of science to the public in my memory," (see > http://go.nature.com/yujz84) and climatologist Kerry Emanuel observed > that the subject had "become notorious for its lack of scientific > integrity" (Nature 319, 259; 1986). > > Robock's single-digit fall in temperature is at odds with the subzero > (about -25 °C) continental cooling originally projected for a wide spectrum > of nuclear wars. Whereas Sagan predicted darkness at noon from a US-Soviet > nuclear conflict, Robock projects global sunlight that is several orders of > magnitude brighter for a Pakistan-India conflict -- literally the difference > between night and day. Since 1983, the projected worst-case cooling has > fallen from a Siberian deep freeze spanning 11,000 degree-days Celsius (a > measure of the severity of winters) to numbers so unseasonably small as to > call the very term 'nuclear winter' into question. > > Correspondence to: > > Russell Seitz > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/geoengineering/-/np8NQFcq0HUJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
